Thursday, January 3, 2013

It is that
time of the year again when we are at the heights of optimism and are confident
that we can turn over a new leaf and better ourselves. Sadly, after just a
little time, most of us find that we simply don’t have the willpower, energy,
or resources to stick to our goals.

Most of us simply quit at this point, but this year, let us break our past
patterns, and as a nation, stick to our financial resolutions. To help us do
that, I want to highlight some online tools that will make it easier for us to
track our spending, monitor our credit score, and invest in the stock market.

The stepping stone to financial freedom is automation and these tools are a
great starting point to get you on the right track.

Track your spending:

If you are just beginning your journey to financial freedom, the first step is
to keep track of your expenses and create realistic budgets to keep you on
track. Back in the old days, this involved keeping track of your receipts but
with the advent of PFM software, this can be done automatically for you using
tools like PowerWallet and Mint.

These tools allow you to connect your online financial accounts
(checking/savings, CDs, credit cards, mortgages etc.) so that you can see the
history of all your accounts in one place. In addition to automatically
pulling all your transaction data, they will also automatically categorize the
transactions so that you can better understand your expenses and present the
information in easy to understand charts and graphs.

Once you understand how money is being spent, you can now setup monthly budgets
for each category and track your actual spending against those categories.
PowerWallet goes a step further than most PFM software
and will help create a budget for you based on your expenses.

We cannot change our behavior without first understanding it and PFM software
give you the power to plan and the power to organize.

Monitor your credit score:

By now, we are all aware that our credit score greatly impacts our ability to
get the best rates on credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans. A
conservative estimate is that lower credit score costs the average consumer
$4,500 - $6,000 per year due to extra charges that are assessed solely because
of a low credit score.

It is time
to fight back and become smart about managing our credit.

With an increase in ID theft, most financial institutions now bundle credit
monitoring services as part of their offerings. However, these services
generally only monitor for new credit activity and do not give the consumer
access to their credit score.

A better and free solution is
CreditSesame – a great tool that gives you a complete picture of your credit
and loans in one place. Through their partnership with Experian (one of
the 3 credit bureaus) and major financial institutions, they also offer credit
score, credit monitoring, and loan and savings recommendations that will save
you money. They also provide great tips on ways to improve your credit
score.

Invest in the stock market:

Trying to time the market is the most common approach of many investors. With
most
amateur and novice investors losing money in the long run, this strategy is
dangerous and costly. A more conservative way to invest is to use an investment
strategy called dollar cost averaging, that is, investing the same amount on a
regular basis over a specific time period.

The best tool I have found in this
regard is Betterment, which allows you to use this approach to invest in a diversified
portfolio of Treasury Bond ETFs and Stock Market ETFs while giving you the
control over your level of risk. Betterment allows you to set up multiple
savings goals (retirement, college, down payment on a house, etc.) and for each
goal, set your level of risk. The site also offers useful charts to track
your progress and gives advice on the best ways to reach your goals. This
is very much a hands free solution for those who want to take advantage of the
profit potential of the stock market with as little complication or intervention
as possible.

For those who
want to get their feet wet trading individual securities, I would recommend a low cost broker like OptionsHouse. Despite having one of the lowest rates of any
online broker, OptionsHouse has an award winning trading platform - ranked by
Barron’s as #1 for mobile trading - that includes innovative risk management tools
such as the probability calculator (find the likelihood of a stock reaching a
specific price) and volatility charts.

By far the
best feature they offer is their virtual trading platform which allows you to
use virtual dollars to enter virtual orders, track the simulated performance of
your account, and experiment with new strategies in order to hone your trading
skills. This is a great tool for the
novice investor who wants to build their trading confidence before putting real
money to work.

I will leave you with this quote by Dave Ramsey:

“Financial peace isn't the acquisition of stuff. It's learning to live on less
than you make, so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can't
win until you do this.”

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Oftentimes it seems that Personal Finance Management software are a dime a dozen with each new comer offering just a slightly different twist. However, I believe we have a new player in this space who can change the game for good – PowerWallet..

I recently partnered with PowerWallet and believe that their one stop solution to financial management can give them a competitive edge over their competitors.

Company History

PowerWallet was founded by an industry leader, Howard Dvorkin, the founder of Consolidated Credit in response to the Great Recession of 2008 as a means to “give everyday people the tools to help weather the current economic storms and manage their money going forward.” To make this a reality, they interviewed real people with real financial problems to understand what they can do to help. The result of those conversations was to build an online PFM platform that was user-friendly, simple, and accessible to everyone.

Competitive Advantage

Like all PFM software, PowerWallet allows you to connect your online financial accounts so that you can see the transaction history of all your accounts in one place. In addition, each transaction is automatically categorized (you can also change them to your liking) based on the merchant name so that you can keep track of your spending across most common categories.

What sets PowerWallet apart from their competitors is what they do with your transaction data.

In the past I’ve used my share of deal sites like envaluted, offermatic, and mylinkables and was willing to share my purchase history to get great deal offers. However, the business models of envaulted and offermatic were not sustainable and they have both gone since out of business. PowerWallet is attempting to do what these companies have tried and failed by making their product not just a PFM tool but also an integrated and customized deal finder tool.

They accomplish the goal of finding relevant deals (to places you actually shop or visit) by analyzing your recent transactions and matching it against their database of coupons, discounts, and offers online through their partnership with yipit (my sources have told me that they hope to expand the daily deals network in the near future). The end result is that not only can you manage your money using PowerWallet but they will also identify daily savings opportunities for you to take advantage of.

Another competitive advantage is that unlike other more popular tools, PowerWallet makes creating budgets easier by automatically showing you what your spending habits have been for any given category. This helps the user in creating a more realistic budget. You can also choose whether you want to apply this budget for specific time periods – 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years.

They have also taken a page from online bill pay services and incorporated storage of bills directly in your PowerWallet account. From the Bills module, you can directly access your bills from specific service providers. Once you’ve connected all your service providers, the Bill Calendar will show you all your upcoming payments (including the amount) and from here, you can easily access your provider’s website to pay your bill.

My Summary

It will be an uphill battle for PowerWallet to challenge PFM stalwarts like Mint, Quicken, and Yodlee but I think their approach in integrating multiple solutions into their product can work in their favor. The only drawback I see at the moment is that they do not have any mobile solutions and that’s a must if they want to survive.